Abstract
This chapter considers fictional portrayals of frail older women in Norah Hoult’s There Were No Windows (1944), Julia O’Faolain’s No Country for Young Men (1980), Edna O’Brien’s House of Splendid Isolation (1994) and Jennifer Johnston’s Foolish Mortals (2007). These novelists attempt to convey, through imaginative reconstruction, what the experience of frail old age feels like from the inside. They reveal how stereotypes around gender, age and class combine to deny these elderly women a voice and provide an insight into the power mechanisms, including Irish nationalism, weighing against them. Their fiction underlines the fact that however confused and fragile these elderly protagonists may be, and however despised and ignored by the society around them, they all yet retain a powerful sense of their own individuality.
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Ingman, H. (2018). Frail Old Age. In: Ageing in Irish Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96430-0_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96430-0_6
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